This editorial outlines specific questions about the concept “family” as a foundation for life. It points to ethical signals that guide the reader’s move throughout the articles on family issues. Indeed, despite the current life mutations and complexities of today’s society, the ideal family consists of a father, a mother and their children. This family is to be seen as the locus of life birth, its protection and the education to life as well. As a result, the moral value of marriage and the responsibility of “becoming human” should be the leading ethical principles that make the family stable in its development of education for life as a key role in society. This editorial ends up with a panoramic view on various contributions to this issue of family within ethical framework.

Abstract :This editorial note attempts to frame the various articles published in this issue. It argues that, as a phenomenon which is as old as the human history and civilisation, corruption is characteristic of the human weak nature, or better, the fall, biblically speaking. As such, corruption deprives us of our ontological density as beings that aspire to what is good and right in so far as we are created in the image and resemblance of God. It puts a break to our sustained move to moral life as corrupt people tend to give priority to calculative rationality (which seeks short-term individual dividends) over comprehensive rationality open to sustainable results characteristic of the common good. It gives priority to individuality over sociality. This being the case, corruption is a universally evil phenomenon even in those societies where it is hardly observed or where it does not seem to have effects on the socio-political order and economic prosperity. It is within this framework that different analyses and reflections are introduced.

Abstract: This editorial note analyses the concept of independence and gives a framework within which various contributions published in the present issue could be understood. It argues that African independence is never acquired once for all. Instead, it must be seen as a process of Africans’ self-transcendence. In this process, three requirements have to be fulfilled, namely: a determined and minded leadership, a new engagement of the African intellectuals and a renewed African conscience. In this framework, various articles of this issue are introduced.

This reflection centers on the issue of what should be the foundation for those attempting to eradicate Third World poverty? The Millennium Development Goals (MDG) are popular, serving in 2005 to motivate the British Make Poverty History movement, the Live8 consciousness-raising rock concerts and the Johannesburg-based Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAAP). Yet, upon closer inspection, the implementation processes associated with the MDGs have serious weaknesses. They were generated non-transparently by the United Nations, itself moving since the early 2000s to embrace the Washington Consensus and co-operate with the World Bank, to ‘bluewash’ the world’s largest corporations with its Global Compact, to endorse ‘Type 2’ public – private partnership privatization strategies, to condone US militarism, and to reject even elementary democratic reform. The main decisions at the Monterrey and Doha finance and trade summits were biased against poor people, workers, women and the environment. Aspirational targets like the MDGs are, in any case, far less important than the actual social struggles underway across the world for basic needs and democracy. As shown in the 2005 campaigns, work on MDGs distracts us from solidarity with the real agents of progressive social and environmental history, in progressive civil society.